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The purpose of this paper is to summarize the institutional evolution of China's farmland property rights deformity with its internal logic, analyze its property rights deformity and the invasions of these rights under the family operation background, and puts forward fundamental suggestions for reforming farmland property rights in China.

The concept of “public domain” raised by Barzel in 1989 is used and extended to analyze China's farmland system.

There exist five sorts of public domain and two apparent characteristics of property rights deformity: the unclear final controlling rights for some valuable attributes of goods of the “public domain”; and the “public domain” deliberately created by the government. The public domain caused by technical factors and owner's real capability are herein excluded.

China's past and present farmland system is a result of the government's compulsory system arrangements instead of market evolution. The expansion of public domains III and V has directly shrunk peasants' residual property rights. The concept of “public domain” is developed to reveal the essence of China's farmland property rights deformity.

This paper aims to examine the victimisation experiences of farmers, herders and community members within the context of the persistent conflict between farmers and herders across Nigeria, with specific focus on Anambra, Benue and Oyo states in south-east, north-central and south-west geopolitical zones of the country, respectively.

The study used the cross-sectional survey to elicit quantitative data from 725 respondents made up of 256 farmers, 225 herders and 244 community members aged 18 years and above, in six purposively sampled local government areas in the three states, while 16 in-depth interviews, 19 key informant interviews and 18 focus group discussions were conducted to extract qualitative data from purposively sampled farmers, herders, community leaders and members of the study communities.

The results show that farmers, herders and other community members in the study suffered losses in the form of destruction of farmlands and livelihood, internal displacement and human fatalities, for the farmers and community members; and destruction of livelihood, loss of money and human fatalities, for the herders. The paper predicts a worsening of the feud between these groups and the attendant reprisal attacks and victimisation if the current binary narrative of victimhood that privileges the needs and experiences of one group over the other persists, and urges stakeholders to put in place enduring structures that will minimise nomadic herding and ensure proactive security.

The focus on the issue of the “victimisation experiences” of herders and farmers and the invitation to researchers and policymakers to examine the role of the prevailing binary construction of victimhood in the conflict is a refreshing addition to other works on this subject.

This paper explores the relationship between state-led urbanization and primary industry development using the difference-in-differences (DiD) method.

The study uses the DiD method.

Exploiting county-city mergers during 2010–2018, the key strategy to expand the city outward and promote urbanization on the urban fringe by local government, the authors find that county-city mergers led to the growth of primary industry decline by 4.23%. The result can be explained by the loss of essential production factors, including land and labor used for farming. In addition, the negative effect is more pronounced for counties with more substantial manufacturing. The results indicate that urbanization in China relocates land and labor; however, it does not improve the efficiency of agricultural output.

This paper contributes to the understanding of urbanization and rural development from the perspective of the primary industry by showing production factor redistribution. Second, this study complements the literature on local government mergers.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) on sustainable livelihoods in the Tarkwa-Nsuaem Municipality of Ghana. The study seeks to answer the following questions: what is the impact of ASM on livelihoods in the Tarkwa-Nsuaem Municipality? What measures could be put in place to ensure the sustainability of livelihoods in the municipality?

A case study approach to inquiry was used in the study. The authors used interview guides (structured and unstructured) to collect primary data from a sample of 400 household heads, 19 institutions, six ASM firms, six mineral processing companies, and two gold-buying agents, and traditional authorities from the Tarkwa-Nsuaem Municipality.

The findings of the study indicate among other things that land has been rendered unproductive due to the inability of the dominant ASM firms to reclaim lands after mining. The workers’ exposure to cyanide and mercury makes them vulnerable to all manner of health risks, which is a threat to the sustenance of livelihoods. Owing to the unsustainable nature of mining activities, the future indicates not only increases in unemployment but also environmental degradation and health concerns.

The paper contains a significant new perspective of knowledge especially by contextualising sustainable development with ASM. This is an area that has largely been ignored by development researchers. The paper further emphasises the need for policy makers to evolve and embrace developmental approach that is intergenerational.

The purpose is to understand why contract instability occurs when small landowners lease their land to large landholders.

The authors develop a contract theoretical model to understand the stability problem in the farmland lease contract in China, where most landowners are small landholders.

Results from the doubly robust estimation method used on randomly selected interview data from 552 households in nine provinces of China indicate that contract instability can arise endogenously when large landholders sign a contract. The authors conclude that a suitable rent control regime or contract enforcement may be necessary to promote a large-scale farmland transfer in China.

The authors develop a contract theoretical model and apply it to the land rental market in China. Data used are original and collected from farmers located in nine provinces of China.

Relatively high recent returns to farmland investments have led to substantially elevated interest in farmland investments. Absent, however, is a well‐functioning equity market in farmland real estate, or well‐developed indexes of farmland returns that might contribute to the development of tradable shares tied to farmland returns, or to methods to hedge the value of owned agricultural assets. The purpose of this study is to empirically present relevant measures related to farmland returns and other financial assets to provide a broad context for evaluation of farmland investments in a portfolio context. Issues related to the development of a farmland fund and index construction are discussed along with major risk and transactional factors that are somewhat unique to the asset class.

Returns data from a broad set of financial categories and broad set of agricultural returns measures are developed and presented in multiple frameworks to convey temporal persistence, relatedness, and portfolio considerations related to farmland. Issues related to the construction of claims based on agricultural assets are discussed.

Agricultural real estate investments have performed well compared to most other financial assets on most traditional measures of risk adjusted performance. However, the difficulties in direct investment remain and the need to develop securitized conduit exposures to farmland returns is identified.

The study presents a unique set of farmland returns measures and examines the stability of the statistics used to describe these through time. Novel characterizations of the data compared to traditional assets helps investors and asset owners accurately understand the exposure to farmland returns.

This paper quantifies the effects of recent Federal Reserve interest rate changes, specifically recent hikes and cuts in the federal funds rate since 2015, on Midwest farmland values.

The authors apply three autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models to a panel data of state-level farmland values from 1963 to 2018 to estimate the dynamic effects of interest rate changes on the US farmland market. We focus on the I-states, Lakes states and Great Plains states. The models in the study capture both short-term and long-term impacts of policy changes on land values.

The authors find that changes in the federal funds rate have long-lasting impacts on farmland values, as it takes at least a decade for the full effects of an interest rate change to be capitalized in farmland values. The results show that the three recent federal funds rate cuts in 2019 were not sufficient to offset the downward pressures from the 2015–2018 interest rate hikes, but the 2020 cut is. The combined effect of the Federal Reserve's recent interest rate moves on farmland values will be positive for some time starting in 2022.

This paper provides the first empirical quantification of the immediate and long-run impacts of recent Federal Reserve interest rate moves on farmland values. The authors demonstrate the long-lasting repercussions of Federal Reserve's policy choices in the farmland market.

The purpose of the study is to test how land owners respond to the appreciation of land values in the presence of speculation. This paper introduces the concept of “land hoarding,” which is land owners' response to higher land prices by selling more land up to a point beyond which accelerated land price appreciation would lead to land hoarding. Specifically, this paper examines the effect of land value appreciation higher than the opportunity cost of selling the land (measured by treasury‐bill (T‐bill) rate) on land sale and land hoarding.

A theoretical framework is developed to understand the demand for agricultural land retention with and without speculation, the former informing land hoarding behavior. A linear regression model was introduced and estimated using ordinary least square (OLS) method. A panel data model and analysis is also introduced, and following appropriate model selection tests, a fixed effect panel data estimation method is implemented. Data from 48 states, spanning from 1950 to 2004, are utilized.

An inverse relationship is found between the rate of land value appreciation and the demand for land by farmers, suggesting that the standard direct relationship between appreciation and land supplied to development holds. However, the additional finding of an inverse relationship between the rate of land value appreciation in excess of the risk‐free rate of return and agricultural land development confirms the existence of an identifiable speculative demand component that involves land hoarding.

To the extent to which the findings are broadly applicable, one policy implication is that enhanced land retention can be achieved through market mechanisms. For example, the notion that reduced T‐bill rates can actually result in market triggered land preservation is an interesting policy related finding. Equally interesting is the notion that policies that can trigger increases in the rate of appreciation of farmland may also potentially result in the agricultural hoarding of land. Obviously, enhanced profitability in agriculture due to programs targeting viability, commodity price support, reduction of regulation or market expansion programs can potentially affect land retention.

This paper introduces the “land hoarding hypothesis.” High rates of land appreciation can be expected to signal that holding the land may yield better returns than selling it, suggesting that if rates of land appreciation become significantly high enough, farmers may begin to hoard land, not sell it, to maximize long‐term returns. This concept can be valuable to market‐based agricultural land retention programs at the urban fringe. By linking speculative behavior, land demand and existence of a hoarding behavior under some conditions, this paper adds value and originality to the literature.

Effective farmer participation in the rural land consolidation process has become increasingly important because it improves results in rural land consolidation and land use efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to examine the mechanism of farmers’ effective participation in Chinese rural land consolidation.

The authors empirically assess farmers’ effective participation in the rural land consolidation process in ten counties of China’s Hubei province. Focusing on an effective decision-making model, the authors comprehensively evaluated farmer participation using surveys that incorporated an index system and analyzed survey results using a structural equation model to examine factors that influenced farmer’s effective participation.

The results of the study suggest that the correlations between farmers’ effective participation and the impacting factors the authors proposed were particularly strong. In addition, participation ability, participation opportunity and participation incentive are strongly associated with effective farmer participation. Thus, the authors highlight that incentives should be provided to encourage farmers’ effective participation in rural land consolidation.

Because of the chosen approach and the set of the research object, the geographic context of the empirical survey work was limited; furthermore, the authors only studied the influencing factors at the individual level, leaving the interaction effects between governmental factors and farmer individual factors inadequately explained.

Despite those limitations, these results serve as an important reference for government agencies and stakeholder groups in rural land consolidation decision making.

Change in the economic status of a low-income country is accompanied by an expected increase in investment and economic activities along with land degradation and biodiversity loss. This study aims to explore Ghana's transition from a low-income to a lower-middle income economy, and the impact of the accompanying rise in extractive activities on the upstream cocoa supply chain (CSC) and its supporting ecosystem.

The author conducted interviews and made critical observations on Ghana's upstream CSC. Grounded theory (GT) and system dynamics (SD) methodologies were employed to extract and analyze themes from the data gathered. Causal loop diagrams were derived from the analyzed data to provide insight into the possible long-term structural behavior of the upstream CSC due to the change in Ghana's economic status.

The findings suggest that continuous increase in land capture by open-cast mining and logging concessionaires, poor environmental law enforcement and farmer discontentment could cause a decline in cocoa production and biodiversity.

This research could stimulate the identification of a most effective alternative policy (such as agroecological farming) to improve the living standards of upstream CSC partners and reduce biodiversity loss. The models herein could serve as a learning/demonstration tool for researchers, academia and policymakers when brainstorming students, or during stakeholder (community/society) engagement/consultation sessions, to discuss policy decisions and their consequences. The model approach could also be helpful when designing strategic land-use policies. This could improve understanding of the complex interdependent relationships and the consequences of land degradation, loss of biodiversity and rural livelihood from a system thinking perspective.